The River House

by Margaret Leroy

  Gray goose and gander,

  Waft your wings together,

  And carry the good king’s daughter

  Over the one-strand river.

  I don’t know what it was about the poem. It made her think perhaps of the walks we sometimes took on weekend afternoons, when Greg was busy in his study preparing his lectures: driving down to the river, parking on a patch of gravel where nobody seemed to come, walking along the river path where in summer the balsam and meadowsweet grow higher than your head. Amber especially loved those walks, poking around with Molly in the tangle of bushes beside the path and coming upon some tiny, astonishing creature—a sepia moth with lacy wings, a beetle like a jewel, black and emerald. Or maybe it was just the sound of the words—maybe gander sounded to her a little like Amber—for when children are greedy for poetry, it’s often for the sound as much as the sense. There was a picture that went with the poem—the rush-fringed mud flats beside the glinting river; the princess a teenage girl in a cloak and a coronet with a look of perplexity; the soaring goose, wide-winged. I’d read it endlessly, ’til it had no meaning, but it always evoked a particular mood—lonely, a little melancholic, with bulrushes whispering and the smell of the river, the mingled scent of salt and rotting vegetation. This house would have been perfect for us in those days. But things don’t always happen at the right time in our lives, and I think my daughters now scarcely notice the house they live in, as they move toward independence and their center of gravity starts to shift away.

  Molly has begun packing, ready for Sunday and the start of her first term at Oxford; the hall is cluttered with boxes. I check my voice mail for messages. Amber must be already home: she leaves a trail behind her—her shoes kicked off, her grubby pink school-bag with books spilling out, her blazer, still inside out, flung down on the floor. I remember she had the afternoon off for an orthodontic appointment.

  I call to her. She appears at the top of the stairs. The light from the landing window shines on her and glints in her long red hair. She is drinking something electric blue from a bottle.

  “You shouldn’t drink that stuff,” I say routinely. “It leaches the calcium out of your bones. Girls of twenty are getting osteoporosis.”

  With a stagy gesture, she hides the bottle behind her.

  “You weren’t meant to see it,” she says.

  “Nice day?”

  “OK,” she says.

  She pushes back the soft heap of her hair, tossing her head a little. Stray flyaway bits turn gold.

  “Have you finished your Graphics course work?”

  She shrugs. “I’m waiting to get in the mood.”

  There’s a brief blare of music as she opens her door and goes back into her bedroom.

  Molly, making the most of her last week of leisure, is sprawled on the sofa in the living room, her little pot of Vaseline lipsalve beside her. She’s already dressed and made-up for the art exhibition; she’s put on lots of pink eye shadow, and she’s wearing one of her many pairs of embroidered jeans. She glitters against the dark colors of my living room, the kilims and patchwork cushions. My daughters dazzle me, with their long limbs, bright hair, and that sudden startling shapeliness that seems to happen between one day and the next. Molly once told me she could remember the precise day—she was just thirteen, she said—when she first looked at herself in the mirror with interest.

  She fixes me now with eyes that are dark and glossy as licorice.

  “Hi, Mum. I don’t suppose there’s any food?”

  I suppress a sigh. Molly is quite capable of complaining that there’s never anything to eat while standing in front of a fridge containing a shepherd’s pie, a cheesecake, and six yogurts.

  “I’ll be cooking in a minute.”

  “OK.” She turns to me then, her fingers tangled in the kilim on the sofa. Her lips are slick from the Vaseline. “Dad is coming, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I say, a bit too emphatically. “Of course.”

  I remember her as a little girl, one time when I had a case conference and couldn’t make it to her Harvest Festival: What’s the point of me learning all the words to these songs if you aren’t there to hear me?

  “Dad wouldn’t miss it,” I tell her.

  “I want him to see it.”

  “Of course you do,” I say. “Don’t worry. He’ll be there.”

  I go to the kitchen to ring him, so that she won’t be able to hear.

  My kitchen soothes me, with its warm red walls and its silence. It’s a jumble of things that don’t quite fit together, that almost seem to belong in different houses. There’s a clutter of mismatched flowered china on the dresser, and a mirror shaped like a crescent moon, and an apothecary cabinet that I loved the look of, though its many little drawers are really very impractical. I keep all sorts of oddments in the drawers, things that aren’t much use but that I can’t bear to get rid of—the wrist tags the girls were given in hospital just after they were born, and a piece of pink indeterminate knitting Molly did in infant school, and the tiny photos you get in the pack of assorted prints from the school photographer, that are too small to frame but that I’d never throw away. On the wall by the sink, there’s a copy of my sister Ursula’s painting of the Little Mermaid, from one of the fairy-tale books she’s illustrated, the mermaid diving down through the blue translucent water, with around her the dark, drenched treasure and seaweed like curling hair. When Molly was a toddler, the picture used to trouble her, and she’d stare at it with widening licorice eyes: “But won’t she drown, Mum, under all that water?” On the windowsill there are some leggy geraniums, and apples from the Anglican convent down the road. Passersby were invited to help themselves to the apples, and I had some vague hope that, given their ecclesiastical origins, they might be especially nourishing. I see in the rich afternoon light that it all needs cleaning, that I haven’t wiped my windowsills for weeks.

  He’s slow to answer. I worry that he’s in the middle of a tutorial.

  “Greg, it’s me. It was just to check you hadn’t forgotten tonight.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “It’s Molly’s exhibition. The art show at the school.”

  There’s a brief silence. Something tenses in my chest.

  “Hell,” he says then.

  “I did tell you.” I hear the irritation edge into my voice—I try to control it. “It matters, Greg.” It depresses me how familiar this is—me always wanting more from him than he is willing to give. “She worked so hard,” I tell him. “And she spent all yesterday stapling it up.”

  “Look, I’ll be there, OK? There’s no need to go on about it. Though it’s quite a pain, to be honest. I was hoping to get in a bit more work on my book.”

  I sit there a moment longer. I should be making dinner, but I just wait for a while and let the quiet knit up the raveled bits of me and ease away the disturbance of the day. I see that a tiny fern is growing out of the wall behind the sink. This shouldn’t happen. An apple shoot once sprouted from a pip that had fallen behind my fridge. Sometimes I feel that if I relaxed my vigilance for too long, my house would rapidly revert to the wild.

  I decide I will make a vegetable gratin, a concession to Amber’s incipient vegetarianism. I cut up leeks and cauliflower. I’m just at the delicate stage, adding the milk to the roux, when the phone rings.

  A woman’s voice, bright and vivid. “Am I speaking to Ginnie Holmes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ginnie. Great. I’m so glad I managed to get hold of you.” She’s too polite; she wants something. Behind her, there are ringing phones, a busy, clattery office. “I’m Suzie Draper,” she says, as though she’s someone I should know.

  “Hi, Suzie.” I brace myself.

  She’s ringing from Cosmopolitan, she says, and she’d be hugely grateful for my comments.

  “I read that study you did on teenage sexuality—the one that was in The Psychologist,” she says. “I thought you made some great points.”

 
; “Right,” I say.

  “I’d love to have your perceptions for something I’m writing,” she says. “You know, as a psychologist. It’s a piece on one-night stands. Would you have a few moments, perhaps, Ginnie?”

  “Yes. Sure,” I tell her.

  There’s a smell of burning. I reach across to pull the pan off the heat.

  “It’s about a trend we’ve noticed, Ginnie. That more and more women are choosing one-night stands. You know, choosing just to have sex? A bit less concerned about commitment and so on.”

  I’m distracted because the sauce is ruined, and I don’t think there’s enough milk to make any more.

  “The thing is,” I say without thinking, “you don’t always know it’s a one-night stand ’til afterward.”

  There’s a little pause. This isn’t what she wants.

  “Ginnie, would you like me to ring you back?” she says then, rather anxiously. “So you can have a bit of a think about it?”

  “No. It’s fine. Really.”

  “OK. If you’re sure.” She clears her throat. “So, Ginnie, d’you agree that lots of women today can enjoy sex without strings? What I mean is—sex without love, I suppose. Without romance. Like men have always done?”

  I take a deep breath and try to think up some intelligent insight. But I don’t really have to say much; she puts the words in my mouth, and I only have to agree.

  “That’s a good thing, surely—women taking initiatives, being clear in what they want? Rather than always fitting in with men?”

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  “I mean, to be honest, I’ve been there, Ginnie: I’m sure we’ve all been there—you know, letting men set the agenda. But what we have now is women saying, I really want that guy, and I’m going to have him.”

  I agree that this is a good thing.

  The door opens and Amber comes in. She’s overheard some of the conversation and makes a vomiting face. I gesture at her to go.

  “Is it OK if I quote you on that, Ginnie? This idea that more and more women enjoy sex for itself and kind of keep it separate. I can quote you?”

  I tell her, yes, she can quote me.

  She thanks me profusely and seems to be happy enough.

  I put down the phone with a quick surge of guilt about the women who’ll read the things I’ve said—thought up at the end of a tiring workday while the dinner was burning. They surely deserve better.

  I open the window to let out the burned smell. A blackbird is singing in the pear tree in my garden. I stand there for a moment, listening to the blackbird’s lavish song, leaning on the windowsill, thinking about the last time I had a one-night stand. Quite a long time ago now. It was just before I met Greg: An attractive pediatrician I met at a conference on attention deficit disorder seduced me by pretending to read my palm. I loved his touch as he made to trace out my lifeline, as if he’d discovered a new erogenous zone—that was the best bit really. The sex was pleasant enough, but the next morning, when we made love again before the plenary session, it took him forever to come, and afterward he complained he was getting a cold and sent me out to buy Lemsip. When we said good-bye, I asked for his phone number—not really wanting to see him again, just feeling it was only polite to ask—and he said, It’s in the phone book. I remember driving home down the motorway, tired and rather hungover, and noticing in the mirror at a service station that there were mascara smudges under my eyes and I looked like I’d been crying.

  I wonder if that was really why I married Greg—to get away from all those complications, the unfamiliar beds, mismatched desires, awkwardness about phone numbers. It was such a relief for everything to be settled. And choosing Greg was surely a good decision. I tell myself we have a solid marriage: that it really doesn’t matter that we haven’t made love for years.

  I hunt in the fridge for milk. There’s just an inch left in the bottle. I add some water from the tap and start again with the sauce.

  CHAPTER 4

  GREG IS THERE ALREADY, parked outside the school. He gets out of his car. From a distance he seems the perfect academic—tall, thin, cerebral-looking, with little wire-rimmed glasses. He never seems to age, though his hair, which was reddish, is whitening.

  “Are you OK?” I ask him.

  “Not exactly,” he says. He has a crooked, rueful smile. “It was the Standards and Provisions Committee this morning.”

  The exhibition is in the art suite, up at the top of the building. We go into the first room. The place is crowded already, and crammed with sculptures and paintings, the whole room fizzing with color. I’m dazzled by this marvelous multiplicity of things—harsh cityscapes, bold abstracts, masks, pottery, flowers. Beside us a boy with a baseball cap and a laconic expression is standing in front of a painting, his arm wrapped around his girlfriend. “Is this the one with me in?” he says. His face is pink and proud. I feel an instant, surprising surge of tenderness, like when I used to weep embarrassingly at infant school carol concerts. There are certain startling emotions—rage at whatever threatens your child, or this surging tenderness, or fear—that you only really feel when you have children. I talk about this sometimes with Max Sutton, my lawyer friend from university, when we meet up over a glass or two of Glenfiddich and compare lifestyles—mine, domestic, anxious, enmeshed; his, bold and coolly promiscuous. He’s traveled widely, been to Haiti, Columbia—nothing seems to throw him. “To be honest, Ginnie, I never feel fear,” he says. “You don’t know what fear is ’til you have children,” I tell him. “It’s your children who teach you fear.”

  We’re offered Chardonnay, and cheese straws made in Food Technology that crumble when you bite them. Mr. Bates, Molly’s art teacher, comes to congratulate her; he has a single earring and looks perpetually alarmed. Cameras whir and flash as embarrassed students are photographed.

  Eva is there, in red crushed velvet from Monsoon.

  “Molly! Your pictures are wonderful. Are you going to be like Ursula, do you think? You’ve certainly got the gene. Ginnie, I love Molly’s stuff!”

  We hug. I’m wrapped in her capacious arms and her musky cedarwood scent. We’ve been close since the time we first bonded, in a moment of delicious hysteria at prenatal class, when I was pregnant with Amber, and Eva was having Lauren and Josh, her twins. It was during the evening when you could bring your partner, and some of the men, seeking perhaps to assert a masculine presence in this too-female environment, were pronouncing on the benefits of eating the placenta: They claimed it was full of nutrients. I saw that Eva was shaking with barely suppressed laughter, and I caught her eye and we had to leave the room.

  I tell her about the Cosmopolitan journalist.

  She grins. “I used to love Cosmo,” she says. “Now I buy those lifestyle magazines—you know, ‘Forty-nine things to do with problem windows.’”

  “But, Eva, you haven’t got problem windows.”

  “I’m working on it,” she says.

  “Mum,” says Molly, “you’ve got to see my stuff.”

  Her display is in the second room. She pulls Amber and me toward it. I look around for Greg, but he’s met a woman from his department, an earnest woman with wild gray hair who lectures in Nordic philology; she has a daughter here. They’re having an urgent discussion about spreadsheets.

  “I’ll be right with you,” he tells me, but he shows no sign of following us.

  “Mum, come on,” says Molly. “I want you to see my canvas.” She has a look she sometimes had as a child, when she would tug at me, especially after Amber had arrived and she couldn’t get enough of me: intent, with deep little lines between her eyes.

  We go into the second room. Her display is in the corner, facing us as we enter—her sketchbooks and pottery piled on the table, and behind them the canvas, nailed up on the wall. I stare at the painting. It’s huge, taller than me, so the figures are more than life-size. I don’t know how she controlled the proportions, how she made it so real. It’s based on a photo from my childhood—Ursula and me a
nd our mother and father, in the garden at Bridlington Road. I don’t know who took it, perhaps a visiting aunt. It’s a rare photo of all of us together, and we look just like a perfectly normal family. It was one of a heap of old photos that Molly found in the kitchen cabinet; she was hunting around for something to paint for her final A-level piece. “It has to be about change,” she said. “I think it’s a freaky topic. Change is totally random. I mean, it could be anything.” She was pleased when she found the photos of me and Ursula; she loved our candy-striped summer frocks, our feet in strappy, shiny shoes. The two of us would stand to attention with neat, cheerful smiles every time anyone pointed a Kodak in our direction. “Look, you’ve got parallel feet,” said Molly. “Amber, look, it’s so cute. In every picture their feet are kind of arranged.”

  The photograph was black and white, but the painting is in the strong acrylic colors Molly loves; our skin in the picture has purple and tangerine in it. The photograph may have made her smile, but the picture she’s painted has an intensity to it. She has quite a harsh style, the lines in people’s faces sketched in boldly, like an etching, so they look older than they really are; and she’s seen so much that was only subtly there in the photograph, that was just a hint, a subtext. My mother, her forehead creased in spite of her smile. My father, a looming presence, his shadow falling across us: my father, who was a pillar of the community, a school governor, a churchwarden, a grower of fine lupines—and I think how shockingly glad I was when he died. Ursula and me, eight and six, with our parallel feet in their shiny shoes, not wanting to step out of line. I see myself then, my conscientious smile, my six-year-old hope that if I was good, stayed good, everything would be all right. I wonder if Molly has brought to this painting some knowledge she has of my family. Yet I’ve told my children so little, really, even though in my work I always maintain that families shouldn’t have secrets. Maybe Molly’s gleaned something from the absolute rule I have that there’s no hitting in our family, or from the things I’ve said about marriage, the advice I so often feel a compulsion to give. “The very worst thing in a man is possessiveness. … Don’t ever imagine that you can change a man. … Promise me—if he’s cruel or hits you, that’s it, it’s over, you go straight out of that door. Promise me. …” “Yeah, yeah,” they’ll say, glancing at each other with a look of complicity, of There she goes again, indulging me: “We know, Mum, you’ve told us.”